Signs Before the Fall

While the sanctuary burned, everything that came to hand was plundered, and there was slaughter without number of all who were caught. There was no pity for age and no respect for rank: children and old men, laymen and priests, were cut down alike. The war closed round every kind of person and pursued them all, those who begged for mercy and those who fought back alike. The roar of the flames, which carried far, mingled with the groans of the falling; and because the hill was high and the burning building so vast, one would have thought the whole city was on fire. Nothing could be imagined louder or more terrible than that noise. There was the war-cry of the Roman legions sweeping forward together, the shrieks of the rebels hemmed in by fire and sword, and the people cut off above running in panic into the arms of the enemy and wailing at their fate. The multitude in the city joined in the cries of those on the hill; and many who were wasting away with hunger, whose lips were already closed, found strength when they saw the sanctuary burning for lamentation and outcry once more. Perea and the mountains round about echoed back, making the roar heavier still. Yet what was suffered was more terrible than the uproar. One would have thought the temple hill was boiling up from its roots, so full of fire was it on every side; yet the blood was more plentiful than the fire, and the slain outnumbered the slayers. Nowhere could the ground be seen for the dead; the soldiers ran over heaps of bodies in pursuit of those who fled. The mass of the robbers forced their way through the Romans and barely broke out into the outer temple, and from there into the city; what was left of the common people took refuge in the outer colonnade. Some of the priests at first tore up the spikes from the sanctuary, with their bases made of lead, and hurled them at the Romans. Then, as this achieved nothing and the fire burst out upon them, they withdrew to the wall, which was twelve feet thick, and stayed there. Two men of distinction, who could have saved themselves by going over to the Romans, or held out to share the fortune of the rest, threw themselves into the fire and were burned with the sanctuary: Meirus son of Belgas, and Joseph son of Dalaeus. [a]

Judging it pointless to spare the buildings around it now that the sanctuary was burning, the Romans set fire to them all: what was left of the colonnades, and the gates except two, one on the east and one on the south; these too they later razed. They also burned the treasure chambers, which held a boundless quantity of money, boundless stores of clothing, and other valuables; in short, the whole wealth of the Jews was heaped up there, for the rich had moved the contents of their houses there. They came next to the one remaining colonnade of the outer temple. Women and children and a mixed crowd of the common people had taken refuge on it, about six thousand in all. Before Caesar had decided anything about them or given orders to the commanders, the soldiers, carried away by rage, set fire to the colonnade; and so some perished flinging themselves out of the flames, and others in them. Of all that multitude not one escaped. A false prophet was the cause of their destruction. That very day he had proclaimed to the people in the city that God commanded them to go up to the temple, there to receive the signs of their deliverance. At that time many prophets had been planted among the people by the tyrants to announce that they should wait for help from God, so that fewer would desert, and so that hope would hold those whom neither fear nor guards could hold. A man in misfortune is quickly persuaded; and when the deceiver paints for him a release from the evils that grip him, the sufferer gives himself up wholly to hope. [f]

So it was that deceivers, who told lies in God’s name, led the wretched people astray, while they neither heeded nor believed the plain portents that foretold the desolation to come. As if thunderstruck, as if they had neither eyes nor mind, they ignored God’s proclamations. So it was when a star like a broadsword stood over the city, and a comet that lasted a whole year. So it was when, before the revolt and the stirring toward war, while the people were gathering for the Feast of Unleavened Bread, on the eighth of the month Xanthicus, at the ninth hour of the night so great a light shone around the altar and the sanctuary that it seemed to be bright day; and this lasted half an hour. To the inexperienced it seemed a good sign, but the sacred scribes at once judged it to portend what afterward came to pass. At the same feast a cow that someone had brought for sacrifice gave birth to a lamb in the middle of the temple court. The eastern gate of the inner sanctuary was of bronze and immensely heavy. Twenty men could barely shut it toward evening; it was fastened with iron-bound bars and had bolts let down very deep into a threshold made of a single stone. Yet it was seen to have opened of its own accord at the sixth hour of the night. The temple guards ran and told the captain, and he came up and could barely shut it. Again, to the uninstructed this seemed the best of omens, as if God were opening to them the gate of blessings; but the learned understood that the security of the sanctuary was dissolving of its own accord and that the gate was opening as a gift to the enemy, and they declared among themselves that the sign meant desolation. Not many days after the feast, on the twenty-first of the month Artemisius, a supernatural apparition was seen, too great to be believed. What I am about to tell would, I suppose, have seemed a fable, had it not been reported by those who saw it, and had the disasters that followed not been worthy of such signs. Before sunset, chariots were seen in the air all over the country, and armed battalions speeding through the clouds and surrounding the cities. And at the feast called Pentecost, when the priests had gone into the inner temple by night, as their custom was, to perform their service, they said that they first felt a movement and heard a crash, and after that a voice as of a multitude: “We are departing from here.” [i]

More terrible still: four years before the war, when the city was enjoying the deepest peace and prosperity, one Jesus son of Ananias, an uncouth peasant of the common people, came to the feast at which it is the custom for everyone to make booths for God, and suddenly began to cry out in the temple: “A voice from the east, a voice from the west, a voice from the four winds; a voice against Jerusalem and the sanctuary, a voice against bridegrooms and brides, a voice against the whole people!” Day and night he went about all the alleys crying this. Some of the leading citizens, angered at words of such ill omen, seized the man and beat him severely. But he said nothing in his own defense, and nothing privately to those who struck him, but went on shouting the same cries as before. Then the rulers, supposing, as was the case, that the man was moved by some power beyond the human, brought him to the Roman governor. There, though he was flayed to the bone with whips, he neither begged for mercy nor wept, but, giving his voice the most mournful turn he could, he answered each stroke: “Woe, woe to Jerusalem!” When Albinus, who was then governor, asked him who he was, where he came from, and why he uttered these cries, he made no answer whatever, but never stopped chanting his dirge over the city, until Albinus judged him mad and let him go. All the time until the war he neither went near any of the citizens nor was seen talking with anyone, but every day, like a prayer he had learned by heart, he lamented: “Woe, woe to Jerusalem!” He never cursed any of those who beat him day after day, nor blessed those who gave him food; to everyone his one reply was that grim foreboding. He cried loudest at the festivals. For seven years and five months he kept it up, and his voice neither grew hoarse nor tired, until he saw his foreboding fulfilled in the siege, and then he ceased. As he was going around on the wall, he cried at the top of his voice: “Woe, woe again to the city, and to the people, and to the sanctuary!” And as he added at the last, “And woe, woe to me too!” a stone hurled from an engine struck him and killed him on the spot. He gave up his life still uttering those forebodings.

Anyone who considers these things will find that God cares for mankind and in every way shows the race of men beforehand the way to safety, but that men perish through their own folly and evils of their own choosing. For the Jews, after pulling down Antonia, made the temple square, though they had it written in their oracles that the city and the sanctuary would be taken when the temple became square. But what most of all roused them to the war was an ambiguous oracle, likewise found in their sacred writings, that at that time one from their country would rule the world. This they took to mean one of their own, and many of their wise men went astray in judging it. But the oracle in fact signified the reign of Vespasian, who was proclaimed emperor in Judea. Yet it is not possible for men to escape fate, even when they foresee it. They interpreted some of the signs to suit their pleasure and scorned others, until the capture of their country and their own destruction proved their folly. [r]